Declaring app requirements

There are a variety of devices powered by Android and not all of them provide the same features and capabilities. To prevent your app from being installed on devices that lack features needed by your app, it's important that you clearly define a profile for the types of devices your app supports by declaring device and software requirements in your manifest file. Most of these declarations are informational only and the system does not read them, but external services such as Google Play do read them in order to provide filtering for users when they search for apps from their device.

For example, if your app requires a camera and uses APIs introduced in Android 2.1 (API Level 7), you must declare these as requirements in your manifest file as shown in the following example:

With the declarations shown in the example, devices that do not have a camera or have an Android version lower than 2.1 cannot install your app from Google Play. However, you can declare that your app uses the camera, but does not requireit. In that case, your app must set the required attribute to false and check at runtime whether the device has a camera and disable any camera features as appropriate.